How to make heapq evaluate the heap off of a specific attribute?

Question

I wish to hold a heap of objects, not just numbers. They will have an integer attribute in them that the heap can sort by. The easiest way to use heaps in python is heapq,

Answer 1

You could implement a heapdict. Note the use of popitem() to get the lowest priority item.

import heapdict as hd
import string
import numpy as np

h = hd.heapdict()
keys = [char for char in string.ascii_lowercase[:10]]
vals = [i for i in np.random.randint(0,10, 10)]
for k,v in zip(keys,vals):
    h[k] = v
for i in range(len(vals)):
    print h.popitem()